It is well known that in a silver halide color photographic light-sensitive material an aromatic primary amine color developing agent oxidized with an exposed silver halide reacts with a coupler to form a dye such as an indophenol, an indoaniline, an indamine, an azomethine, a phenoxazine, a phenazine or a like dye, whereby a color image is formed. In this photographic system, a subtractive color process is ordinarily employed for color reproduction and color images are formed by yellow, magenta and cyan dyes.
Among them, in order to form cyan dye images, phenolic or naphtholic couplers are generally employed. However, these couplers have a problem in that color reproducibility is deteriorated since dyes formed therefrom have undesirable absorption in blue and green regions. Accordingly, it has been desired to solve such a problem.
In order to solve this problem, heterocyclic compounds have been proposed as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,728,598 and 4,873,183 and European Patent 0249453A2. These couplers have, however, other problems in that they have a low coupling activity and in that fastness of dyes formed therefrom are very poor.
Pyrrolotriazole couplers have been proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,256,526 and European Patent 0545300 as couplers for solving the above-described problems. Although these couplers are excellent in hue and coupling activity, fastness of dye images formed therefrom is not sufficient. Particularly, light fastness is inferior compared with conventional phenolic couplers. Further, they are very liable to create color mixing during processing (cyan color mixing in a magenta color image or a yellow color image) caused by their high coupling activity and large molar absorption coefficient of dyes formed therefrom in comparison with conventional phenolic couplers. Hence, improvements in these problems have been desired.